From the Universal to the Local

Abstract

This chapter examines the different frameworks adopted for narrating the history of Wales in works composed between the mid-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. First, it analyses the treatment of Wales in the world chronicle written in Welsh and completed in 1552 by Elis Gruffudd, a member of an impoverished Flintshire gentry family, while serving in the English garrison in Calais. This is followed, second, by an assessment of the scope and purpose of the first works conceived as histories of Wales, both written in English by Welsh Renaissance scholars who adapted the medieval narrative framework of Brut y Tywysogyon in accounts focused on the period from the late seventh century to the Edwardian conquest: Humphrey Llwyd’s Cronica Walliae (1559) and the first printed history of Wales, David Powel’s The Historie of Cambria (1584), an edited and expanded version of Llwyd’s work. Third, the chapter turns attention to histories of families and counties by members of the Welsh gentry, including chorographical accounts (influenced by similar works in England) such as George Owen of Henllys’s Description of Penbrokshire (1603), and highlights their greater readiness than Llwyd and Powel to cover events from the Edwardian conquest of Wales down to their own day.